Historiography and Identity IV: Across Medieval Eurasia

This is the fourth of six volumes in a book series exploring constructions of identity in medieval historiography, from ancient and early Christian precedents to late medieval vernacular histories in Central and Eastern Europe. They are a result of the Visions of Community SFB project funded by the Austrian Research Council FWF from 2011 to 2019. The present volume extends the mainly European focus of the series to probe into a more global perspective, exploring the historiographical cultures of a number of different Eurasian macro-regions: China, Japan, Iran, South Arabia, Syria, Byzantium, Lotharingia, and Spain. The broader, Eurasian perspective can contribute to a deeper understanding of the very different ways in which works of historiography could communicate, promote, and negotiate visions of community and concepts of belonging. For historians of medieval Europe, there is a lot to learn from this wider context. By these efforts at broad comparison, we hope to change the views of European historiography, to assess in what ways early medieval Latin history-writing differed from other cultures of memory, and to discover hitherto ignored undercurrents beneath familiar European patterns that we only notice because we can see the important role they played in other historiographic/al cultures. Furthermore, such de-centring of European history can help to approach Asian historiography on its own terms, without using European developments as a bench-mark. The web of similarities and differences is more complex than simple cultural typologies could express. As the present volume shows, there were several options of writing about the past in all Eurasian macro-regions.